There are USB devices out there that are sort of like a mouse, as in they work as a pointing device, but they don’t show up as a mouse device. For example, the PowerMate USB Multimedia Controller. It’s possible to pipe the events from this or similar ‘weird’ devices to sysmouse, and use it the way you’d expect, with this fix from user tautology.

Did you know there’s a rescue image, created with crunchgen, in DragonFly? If your system can boot to single-user mode, you can use it to at least manipulate data on disk – it includes mined as a simple small editor. (Since vi assumes /usr is mountable.) This rescue image now includesundo, so you can back out changes on a Hammer volume.

Matthew Dillon has been testing on more NVMe hardware, or at least what is supposed to be NVMe hardware, and he has a writeup of the results that may be useful for anyone planning a shopping trip soon.

If you have a ral(4) wireless card that didn’t function as expected, it may suddenly work for you now on DragonFly 4.5 due to the large wifi update. The ral(4) driver covers a lot of hardware, so check the man page for all the commercial names.

BSDNow 143 has the usual roundup of news, plus a conversation with Matthew Macy about graphics improvements in FreeBSD.

We need DragonFly people interviewed, since DragonFly graphics improvements have been leading the pack, so to speak. I’m linking to the Jupiter Broadcasting site again since I don’t see this episode up on the BSDNow site yet.

If you’re on DragonFly master and are using one of these devices, now is the time to update and try. Note that this removes the separate network interface that’s specific to the device and creates only a wlanX device.

Update: Matt reminded me that at least half the work came from Imre Vadasz; I missed it because I was only looking at the commit email names – mea culpa.

BSDNow 142 is out. You might think the title is about Perl, the language, on BSD, but it’s because there’s an interview with FreeBSD developer Alfred Perlstein. I’m sure he gets that a lot. Among the other news on the episode is a note about ordering BSDNow shirts: do it today because it’s the last day they will be available! Also, you can order now and pick it up at BSDCan if you’re going to be there.

(I’m linking to the jupiterbroadcasting site because the bsdnow.tv site isn’t updated as of this writing.)

I took some liberty with the spelling of the title, but it’s more accurate that way: The newest episode of BSDNow has a roundup of BSD news (some of which is pretty major) and an interview of Ike Levy, AKA ‘the guy at NYCBSDCon who showed me how useful pfSense could be’. Ike is speaking at a SemiBUG meeting on the 17th, too, which I’ll post about.

Sepherosa Ziehau posted an extended description of his work with nginx on DragonFly, and the kind of performance he was able to wring out of it. Of special note: he posts all his sysctl changes, which might be useful to anyone else in high-traffic environments, and notes that he was able to saturate a 10Gb link with one DragonFly machine.

The drm/i915 driver has been updated by Francois Tigeot to match what’s in Linux kernel 4.3. His commit post has the general detail; you will especially want this if on DragonFly-current and running on Skylake architecture.

Episode 25 of Garbage went up yesterday and I forgot to check for it, so I’m linking to it now. Among other things, they mention Garbage merchandise. I’d pay for a shirt that pointed out most technology is garbage, to take it from the page.

Tomohiro Kusumi has been working on a port of autofs to DragonFly. If you aren’t familiar with it, autofs is an automatic file system mounter, so when you access a network file system at its local mount point, autofs kicks in and makes sure the remote file system is automatically mounted. He has an initial report on his progress, and expects it to be in DragonFly master in the next month.

Not older people that use DragonFly, but people of any age using an older release of DragonFly: Bezitopo is Pierre Abbat’s topographical program, and he needs testers on versions 4.4 of DragonFly or before. Please give his open-source program a run if you are on the appropriate versions. Trying other BSDs, even though not requested, can’t hurt.

A Notable Omission. Related to the previous link. Also, there’s going to be some panicked selling over the next few weeks, I bet. (via)

Curing Our Slack Addiction. An old business rule: Increase communication, people ask questions instead of making decisions. Increase available data, people make decisions instead of asking questions. (via)